There is going to be much more about the MDFS in operation in the future but I thought this screenshot would illustrate what I have been describing about the way hard discs are partitioned and allocated.

This is the MDFS running in utility mode. I have selected option L to list discs and the above listing appears.

The MDFS uses drive letters to refer to discs and can support drives in the range A to L.

A, B, C and D are allocated to floppy drives.

E & F are the hard discs on controllers 0 and 1.

If you are using Adaptec controllers with second drives, then these would appear as drives G & H.

I & J are the drive letters allocated to controllers 2 and 3.

With the Adaptec system, K & L would be the second drives on controllers 2 and 3.

So here, we can see that I have got drives allocated to all four controllers, but only one drive on each controller. Drives E and F are 480MB drives, each split into 8 partitions. Drive I is a 160MB disc, split up into 2 60MB partitions and a 40MB partition. Drive J is the Syquest drive which has removable cartridges which are formatted to 40MB.

A total of just under 1160MB or 1.13GB!

In total, there are 20 partitions but only 8 can be addressed at any one time when the MDFS is running. I have got 11 of them switched off here which means that the Syquest drive will not show up as it is the ninth active drive and is therefore "invisible".

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